1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computer database systems, and in particular to presentation of information stored in the computer database system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Operational computer database systems have typically been designed to meet mission-critical requirements for supporting the day-to-day operations of a business, including on-line and batch processing of transactional data. An example of transactional data stored in computer database systems is point of sale (POS) data provided by electronic cash registers from the reading of bar codes on items being purchased. The millions of records generated by recording the day-to-day operations of a business, such as point-of-sale data, are often too detailed to be useful to strategic decision makers.
The analysis of transactional data to obtain useful knowledge is financially beneficial to businesses in the retail industry such as suppliers, retailers, large chains, local stores, and advertisers. For example, by analyzing transactional data, a retailer can determine the percentage of purchasers who buy milk during a transaction and also buy cookies. Accordingly, the retailer can estimate the effect of changing the price of milk on the number of cookie products purchased.
Data warehouses were developed to improve the productivity of decision makers by consolidating, converting, transforming, and integrating transactional data into useful knowledge. Data warehouses are therefore another form of computer database system that contain both detailed transaction-level data and summary information.
To facilitate the use of information in a computer database system, many computer database systems include metadata, or "data about data." Metadata includes technical information about operational databases, the transformations of operational data to produce the data stored in the data warehouse, and data warehouse management information. Metadata also includes business information to help users understand the data stored in the data warehouse. Typically, metadata is organized as a set of database tables, separate from the operational databases. However, metadata may be stored as any type of file. The user can view metadata to determine the types of information available in the computer database system.
A particular end user such as a product manager of a retail chain may be concerned only about a specific area of the useful knowledge, such as summary information for a single product or group of products. Another end user in the same company, such as a store manager, may instead wish to examine information for each store. Because some end users may not possess sufficient computer skills or knowledge of the technical information necessary to access information in the different parts of the warehouse, computer database systems often have a set of pre-programmed report types from which the user may select. Reports may present information to the user in statistical, textual and/or graphical form.
To enable a user to easily select from these pre-programmed report types, computer database systems often include data presentation modules. Data presentation modules enable a user to customize reports by specifying "report criteria." An example of a report criterion is a specified date range to which the data displayed in the report will be limited. Data presentation modules may also allow the user to specify report criteria such as the data fields to appear as columns on the report. The user will use the data presentation module in a "report configuration session," in which the user specifies the report criteria desired for the report of interest. Because different users will have different requirements of a report, the data presentation module should provide the user with as much flexibility as possible in specifying report criteria to customize the information to be displayed.
In a typical data presentation module of a computer database system, adding new report types or changing the report criteria available to customize a report type typically involves modifying the data presentation module software. Because the list of available report types and/or the report criteria available for each report type may change rapidly, a data presentation module that can be easily modified to meet organizational and even individual user needs is desirable.